Printing made on a fibrous medium such as paper with an ink-jet printer has the following drawbacks.
(1) Ink bleeds along fibers, and thus high image quality is not achieved.
(2) When water or a chemical adheres to the paper after printing, ink dye or ink pigment is removed from the paper and thus printed records are not preserved.
In order to address the drawback (1), paper coated with resin or the like for preventing the ink from bleeding to improve image quality, i.e., ink-jet printing paper, is widely used.
In order to address the drawback (2), in addition to the aforementioned technique, there has been proposed: a technique to add a cationic resin or the like to include a component for fixing dye and pigment onto the paper; and a technique to adhere a protective film onto the printed paper so that water or chemical does not make contact with ink components.
Furthermore, as a technique to address the drawbacks (1) and (2), there has been known an indirect transfer method for providing the bonding surface of a protective film, which is usually adhered onto paper after printing, with a high-quality image printing capability. Then, according to the indirect transfer method, the bonding surface is adhered onto a target medium after the printing is performed on the protective film.
However, there are a limited number of examples of indirect transfer methods for ink-jet printing, and also, known examples of indirect transfer media are often limited to use in iron-on transfer sheets and ID cards, for example. Therefore, there has not been proposed an indirect transfer method with high image quality, high durability, and high production efficiency, and that can be used for official documents and the like.